Cato Daily Dispatch for November 12, 2003
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Senate Set for MarathonFederal Spending Balloons under Republicans
Bush, Bremer Meet to Hasten Iraq Transition
Senate Set for Marathon
"The Senate readied cots and coffee for a talkathon set to last all Wednesday night on who's to blame for some of President Bush's nominees not making it to the federal appeals bench," The Associated Press reports.
"For 30 straight hours--from Wednesday evening through midnight Thursday--Republicans and Democrats will condemn each other in 30-minute face-offs over four filibustered U.S. Appeals Court nominees: Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, Texas judge Priscilla Owen, Mississippi judge Charles Pickering and Hispanic lawyer Miguel Estrada."
In "Judge Wars," an article published in today's New York Post, Roger Pilon, Cato Vice President for Legal Affairs, writes: "After Democrats lost control of the Senate a year ago, they invoked the Senate's arcane filibuster rules to debate to death nominees said to be 'outside the mainstream.' Because current rules require 60 votes to end a filibuster, the Democrats' maneuver amounts to imposing an extra-constitutional supermajority hurdle for nominees. And that's why Republicans are crying foul--the way the filibuster is being used today is unprecedented."
Federal Spending Balloons under Republicans
"Confounding President Bush's pledges to rein in government growth, federal discretionary spending expanded by 12.5 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, capping a two-year bulge that saw the government grow by more than 27 percent, according to preliminary spending figures from congressional budget panels," The Washington Post reports.
"The sudden rise in spending subject to Congress's annual discretion stands in marked contrast to the 1990s, when such discretionary spending rose an average of 2.4 percent a year."
In "GOP Should Give Spending Cuts a Chance," Cato's Veronique de Rugy and Tad DeHaven write: "Almost 10 years after the GOP swept into Congress, it is evident that the self-proclaimed party of limited government has become the party of unlimited spending. The GOP Congress has delivered three of the top five largest spending sprees in American history--the other two occurred during World War II."
The Cato Institute has been assailing the spending habits of the Republican-led Congress for years. In 2000, Stephen Slivinski, former Cato fiscal policy analyst, wrote "The Spend-Too-Much Congress," in which he says, "The current crop of Republicans is behaving more like pre-Reagan Democrats than like the 'revolutionary' Republicans who vowed to shrink the federal budget five years ago."
Bush, Bremer Meet to Hasten Iraq Transition
"L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, made a hurried return to Washington on Tuesday as Bush administration officials held an urgent round of meetings to discuss ways of speeding up the transfer of power to Iraqis," The New York Times reports.
"The meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said."
According to Patrick Basham, senior fellow in the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government, "Democracy is not a gift that President Bush can bestow on the Middle East. Although the goal is laudable, the administration will be disappointed with its effort to establish a stable liberal democracy in any Middle Eastern nation."
In "A Democratic Iraq? Don't Hold Your Breath," Basham writes: "The Iraqi democratic reconstruction project will be a good deal harder than White House theorists expect. In practice, the realization of Iraq's democratic potential will depend more on the introduction of a free market economic system and its long-term positive influence on Iraqi political culture than on a United Nations-approved election."
Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org
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